Instead of selecting individual items to use as tools for each activity, your items can now added to equipment slots in multiple sets and the sets can be selected for the activities. The items remain equipped until you remove them or they break/eaten/used etc.

A summary about the equipment slots:

• they replace the tools in activities
• items can be equipped on the inventory page
• slots can be purchased with experience points, up to 5 slots
• up to 5 sets of equipment can be set up each with max 5 slots
• equipment sets can be auto-added to activities
• usage will not be limited to activities

We have created an introduction video for SimRepublic that will be visible on the front page to new users. Check it out!

Please can you post it to your facebook if you like it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsQF1dBtFq4

We’ve made some new additions to the war system which will hopefully make it more interesting.

• A new action and some new items have been added – time to visit your research centre.
• Items placed on plots can be targeted by a spy now. The targeted items appear in the planning room.
• A citizen with spy profession can enter the planning room to view some details about the targets.
• The targets in the planning room expire after a day.
• For now, a country can be attacked only if it has a big parliament or its research level is greater than 5.

I have also added a hidden but powerful item which is limited to only a few instances in the game world, and I let you discover its whereabouts.

After a long wait the Immigration Office has returned, led by an idea posted on our forums by BlaatSchaap. Thank you. Players are now free to join any country under the age of 10 days or for their first time to join. Otherwise the rule set by the leader applies.

Defense towers now need a permit from the parliament to begin construction. Permits can be added by a leader in the Big parliament’s Leader Office and they are used up from there at the start of construction.

The basic war system is ready to use. The parliament’s planning room contains the functionality to start a war and to create the tasks to execute. Here is a short introduction to some new concepts and stuff:

• Actions: war consists mainly of actions. They can describe an attack or something else and have predefined requirements and behaviour. Most actions work only during war.
• Plans: a plan is a piece of paper describing an action. It can be created by leaders by choosing which action to execute on which target. The cost to create a plan is deducted from the country budget. Everyone can execute a plan via the execute activity. A plan disappears after use.
• Targets: they can be any game object, but for now only plots (cities, forests etc) are used.
• Spies: this is a new profession that will be used for targetting certain things. Currently leaders and spies can target countries and plots via the info popups.
• New buildings: light arms factory, produces war related items required for some attacks. Defense towers: their only function is to take damage instead of your valuable buildings.

New actions and items will be added in the following weeks.

We’ve added a lot of new furniture to the game, here are a few highlights that I am especially proud of:

Fussball Table

Fridge:

Fireplace:

Designer table:

This is a great fan video made about SimRepublic. I love the fact that players are putting in this effort into the game. Well done!

Similar fan-created content will also be posted on the blog! But it has to be good quality!

We have had great results for SimRepublic since the launch a month ago, and I really hope this is the start of some bigger things to come. I am sharing results here because I want this game to be completely honest to the players, the press and everyone, just because no-one else does this, and honesty sometimes works wonders.

I am happy that there have been a minimal amount of bugs found, and all of them have been corrected. This is down to some great programming by Neme. Fixing small bugs hasn’t taken up much of his time, so he is spending most of his time making small important changes to the game, as well as coding the new war feature for the game, which should be live in a few weeks.

We had an incident a week ago where someone managed to guess an admin account’s password and fool around in the game a bit, but luckily we caught the person and fixed the issues pretty quickly. They spent around 700 unpaid gold credits, which was the main damage to the game internally, but this has all been now corrected.

I think the only really unpopular thing we have done is remove immigration controls from countries, however this is a necessary bad for the game to grow. 100% new players (who have not played the game before), will most likely join their actual home country in the game, mostly due to patriotic feelings, and if a country is closed by an “inner circle” of players, they will just leave the game. This is based on statistics not opinions, so it is fact. Therefore we have opened up immigration, however after immigrating a player finds it much more difficult to do it a second time which prevents skipping from country to country.

The death of a lot of online browser games is having old players completely reject new players. This is someone which will not happen in SimRepublic, and having closed countries and players complaining about the removal of immigration controls is exactly this.

Now for the actual statistics (based on the last 30 days)

Registrations: 2558

Active players in the last 24 hours: 355

Most players seen playing at once: 93

Gold credits spent in the game: 7836

Revenue: 1819 EUR

Almost 100% of this revenue is spent on staff right now, but I feel great that we are able to actually pay them from SimRepublic. This means that they can spend 100% of their time on the game, making new features and balancing it out, which I really hope will bring in more and more players!

Next post will be in one month, I hope for some great numbers!

Helios

We are extremely happy about the growth of the game so far. Yesterday we say over 60 people online at once, and I hope we will reach 100 in the next few days. It’s terrific!

The feedback about the game has also been pretty good, and we are working hard to fix any bugs as soon as possible.